No MarineFord is only a bad place to power scale mihawk, because vista
I just used two examples of characters who were not portrayed well in terms of power during the Marineford besides Mihawk, with Marco and Jinbei, if you can't see the difference of power shown by Marco and Jinbei since then, i don't know what to tell you, and i can also tell you they didn't improve that much during the time skip because both of them are already older fighters who had mastered Haki during Marineford.
Another example is Whitebeard, all the hype and shit they give Whitebeard, but the current Yonkos would absolutely demolish the WB we saw in Marineford.
In fact, i'm not an Admiral guy, but even the Admirals had to be stronger than what we saw back then, because if that's all they had, the Yonkos would eat them for breakfast and the balance of the three powers would make no sense.
Oda wasn't sure of the power ceiling of the series then.